No inmate has been executed in California for more than a decade but the state is at a crossroads with a legal ruling giving a new momentum towards resumption of lethal injections while opponents seek to end the death penalty at the ballot box forever.

Sacramento County prosecutor Anne Marie Schubert, who favours speeding up executions, said: “There’s no truth in sentencing in this state.

“We have to make a decision on what we’re going to do.”

The state is holding a hearing on a proposed new protocol for lethal injection that would use one drug, a barbiturate, to put condemned inmates to death.

A three-drug cocktail was declared unconstitutional by a California court 10 years ago as it could possibly cause pain.

Death penalty opponents are gathering signatures to place a measure on the November ballot that would outlaw the death penalty in the state. At the same time, supporters of capital punishment are seeking support for an initiative to speed up the execution process.

Robert Dunham, of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said: “California has a history of driving the car in both directions at the same time.”

California juries have sentenced nearly 900 people to death since 1978 but only 13 have been executed. Sixty-eight died of natural causes, 36 for other reasons.

Of the 751 remaining inmates, most of them housed at San Quentin, a notorious prison nicknamed The Arena, seven have been on death row since the 1970s. Three are over 80. A row of wheelchairs sits across from the tiers of cells in the jail’s east block.

The death chamber sits unused – despite a £600,000 remodel.

A guard walks along the East Block for condemned inmates.

Anticipating more convictions, officials will open a new death-row wing in the coming weeks. The state has constructed an in-patient psychiatric hospital to handle the needs of death-row inmates.

San Quentin warden Ronald Davis took the job a year ago focused more on the rehabilitation and education programmes offered at the state prison than its role as a facility for executions.

He said: “If I have to preside over one, I’ll try to view it as part of my job and step up to it.”

A majority of Americans – about 56 per cent, the lowest number in 40 years – still support the death penalty, a poll conducted last year by Pew Research Center showed.

Helping drive the change are the success of DNA testing and advocacy by groups such as the Innocence Project in exonerating wrongly convicted death-row prisoners. In 2015, six condemned inmates were cleared in the US, bringing the total to 156 since such efforts began to be tracked in 1973.

Last year, Nebraska became the 19th state to abolish capital punishment. Texas led the country in executing 13 people in 2015, with a total of 531 over the past 40 years, according to state corrections records.

The last person executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen, put to death in 2006 at the age of 76 for the murders of three people more than 25 years earlier.

Soon afterwards, a court ruling outlawed the lethal injection protocol and capital punishment stopped while the state filed appeals.

Charles Edwards Case, who is on death row for murder, types a letter to his attorney with a typewriter.

The state, in a settlement with victims’ families, has announced plans for a new lethal injection protocol. Before it is used, the state must take comments and testimony from the public, which could take up to a year.

The death penalty has been a hot issue for California Democratic governor Jerry Brown. He has promised to uphold the state’s death penalty laws and abide by the lethal injection settlement.

In his previous term as governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown vetoed a bill reinstating capital punishment after the US Supreme Court declared it was being administered in an unconstitutional manner. His veto was overridden.

Opposition to capital punishment by Democratic Attorney General and US Senate candidate Kamala Harris has led death penalty advocates to be sceptical that executions will resume anytime soon.